Costly search and mutual fund flows：（昂贵的搜索和共同基金流动）.pdfVIP

THE JOURNAL OF FINANCE • VOL. LIII, NO. 5 • OCTOBER 1998 Costly Search and Mutual Fund Flows ERIK R. SIRRI and PETER TUFANO* ABSTRACT This paper studies the flows of funds into and out of equity mutual funds. Con- sumers base their fund purchase decisions on prior performance information, but do so asymmetrically, investing disproportionately more in funds that performed very well the prior period. Search costs seem to be an important determinant of fund flows. High performance appears to be most salient for funds that exert higher marketing effort, as measured by higher fees. Flows are directly related to the size of the fund’s complex as well as the current media attention received by the fund, which lower consumers’ search costs. ALTHOUGH MUCH ACADEMIC RESEARCH on mutual funds addresses issues of per- formance measurement and attribution, we can learn more from this indus- try than whether fund managers can consistently earn risk-adjusted excess returns. Researchers studying funds have shed light on how incentives af- fect fund managers’ behavior,1 how board structure affects oversight activi- ties,2 and how scale and scope economies affect mutual fund costs and fees.3 More generally, the fund industry is a laboratory in which to study the ac- tions of individual investors who buy fund shares. In this paper, we study the flows of funds into and out of individual U.S. equity mutual funds to better understand the behavior of households that buy funds and the fund complexes and marketers that sell them. * Tufano is at the Harvard Business School, Sirri is at the Securities and Exchange Com- mission. This paper is a substantial revision of an earlier working paper, “Buying and Selling Mutual Funds: Flows, Performance, Fees, and Services.” We w